Jester, Vamp, & Bus Creep

It's been two weeks focusing on the higher brow end of horror cinema, so we're turning our focus, at least to begin with, on different fare: one of the more delightful American slashers of the 1980s, The House on Sorority Row.

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

The House on Sorority Row is scary, stylish, silly, and unusual—a movie worth thinking about, despite its lightness and speed.

1. The House on Sorority Row has its final girl (Katherine, played by Kate McNeil) but it’s a movie about a group, a fact emphasized by its wonderful Spanish language title—Siete Mujeres Atrapadas or “Seven Trapped Women.” A little over thirty minutes into the film, we get a single shot that takes stock of the group's situation, bringing the women (save one) together in a single, uneasy pan. We start on Katherine, in the middle of the party, and move from woman to woman, racking focus at times, following their gazes as their worried faces watch each other through the crowd. It’s a depiction of women united by a mutual sense of guilt and peril. Their anxiety is also in distinct counterpoint to the scene surrounding them—a rollicking party with upbeat live music. It's a tonal contrast that will continue: these sorority sisters have a dark secret and, for almost all of the film’s runtime, they keep it. The rest of campus, and world, continues on its unruffled way. It’s a dynamic captured, in a potent procession of faces, in a single, elegant shot.
2. The House on Sorority Row contains one of the great slasher scares (big spoiler ahead). This was filed in my mind under the heading “Chekhov’s Clown” but, upon a rewatch this last week, I’ve realized that it’s really a jester. Sorority Row is filled with childhood objects and decor—clown wallpaper, a tricycle, a jack-in-the-box, a multicolored ball—that connect to the slasher's story. In the second act, Katherine explores the attic of the house—a space full of childhood ephemera—and, pulling back a curtain, finds a man-sized jester costume. It’s a scary thing to encounter in an attic, but Katherine lifts the mask and finds the thing empty, just another example of creepy, childhood decor. Later, at the end of the film, Katherine has escaped from the slasher onto a balcony and up the outside of the house into the attic. She does a smart thing that slasher protagonists don’t reliably do: she puts her back to the wall, clutching a gun at the ready, and waits. Right beside her is the jester costume—scary, but we’ve learned earlier that it’s just an empty costume. Katherine watches and waits (all the while experiencing flashbacks and visions from the night’s many traumas), expecting an approach up the attic stairs. Instead, of course, the costume begins to move. It's compelling design—show us something creepy, defang it, then bring it back as a real threat. It’s a scary moment even when you know it’s coming.
3. Sorority Row has a familiar type of slasher plot (spoilers ahead): young people do something awful, they cover it up, and the slasher’s spree serves as a kind of revenge for their crime. It’s an I Know What You Did Last Summer scenario. Here the graduating sorority sisters attempt a prank on their unpleasant house mother Mrs. Slater but, in the process, accidentally shoot her. What’s distinct, though, is that the main action happens all in one day and night. They kill Mrs. Slater right as they’re setting up for a party, and their-cover-up coincides with the slasher spree. The stacking of these two tracks—cover-up and slasher spree—in a condensed time-frame gives Sorority Row its energy. The film is busy and funny and never slows down. There’s a wild, madcap life to Sorority Row, as the seven sisters, in party clothes, try to hide a body while, at the same time, a slasher begins picking people off in the house.

Right Behind You.

A thought on horror's present.

4. An amazing scene in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners has a crowd of vampires dancing and accompanying head vampire Remmick as he sings “Rocky Road to Dublin”—while he himself performs a traditional Irish dance. Sinners is all about music, mostly blues music, and at this point in the movie we’ve heard a lot of exquisite blues. As the vampires work their way into the movie, we hear more and more music from them. When they first approach Smoke and Stack’s juke joint, they play “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” a blues song, but one they sing in unison with a plain, metronomic style that renders it flat—funny even—compared with all the gorgeous music we’ve heard up to this point. Later, when Mary approaches them outside, their music is more affecting: their move into Irish songs with “Will Ye Go, Lassie Go?" is quite beautiful. By the time we get to “Rocky Road to Dublin," an ecstatic musical set piece, the villains have been given their music—their own depth and vibrancy (something not afforded the apex villains of the film: the Klan). When Remmick invites the living folk to join the vampires for a better way of life—a recurring trope in vampire stories—there’s a credibility to it, a sense of depth and richness to their world. Their world is indeed a tempting one. (For an interesting conversation about how vampire music fits in the film, including one user's description of “Rocky Road to Dublin" as a "seduction attempt"—a point that overlaps with my own—see this reddit thread.)

Living Deliciously.

A recommendation.

5. It's easy to poke fun at dorm room philosophizing, but anyone who’s had an intense, deep conversation late into the night knows that these can be powerful, mind-expanding, connection-forming interactions. Simon Strantzas’s “In This Twilight,” from the story collection Nothing is Everything, gives eerie substance to this type of conversation, allowing words to alter our perception, maybe mystically, certainly with mind-expanding force, probing the dark margins of the psyche. The story also describes a chilling scenario that might occur in real life: a young woman’s encounter with an unsettling man at a bus station—a man who follows her onto the bus and sits across the aisle from her. It’s a rich, strange, creepy bus journey, with surprising depths and reversals. It’s more than worth a read or two.

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